Business Intelligence generally refers to a category of software systems and applications used to improve business enterprise decision-making and governance. These software tools provide techniques for analyzing and leveraging enterprise applications and data. They are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, service provision, customer, and supplier analyses. More specifically, Business Intelligence tools can include reporting and analysis tools to analyze, forecast and present information; content delivery infrastructure systems to deliver, store and manage reports and analytics; data warehousing systems to cleanse and consolidate information from disparate sources; and integration tools to analyze and generate workflows based on enterprise systems. Business Intelligence tools work with database management systems to organize, store, retrieve and manage data in databases. Business Intelligence tools include performance management applications to provide business metrics, dashboards, and scorecards, as well as best-practice analysis techniques for gaining business insights.
In many organizations establishing business strategies is an increasingly complex exercise. There are ongoing efforts to supply quantitative tools to enhance business strategy decision making. In particular, there is an increasing focus on Performance Management applications that provide a quantitative framework for monitoring and analyzing various business metrics. A business metric is a measure used to evaluate a quantifiable component of an organization's activities. For example, business metrics may include return on investment, revenues, sales volume, inventory levels, cycle times, supply chain costs, number of customers, and so on.
There are a number of commercially available tools that can monitor various metrics in stand-alone Performance Management applications or packages integrated into the tools. For example, Business Objects, an SAP company, of San Jose, Calif., sells a number of widely used Business Intelligence and Performance Management tools that can monitor metrics, including Crystal Xcelsius™ BusinessObjects Performance Manager™, BusinessObjects Enterprise™, BusinessObjects XI™, and BusinessObjects Dashboard Builder™. These tools include various frameworks for monitoring, including visualization frameworks such as performance dashboards and scoreboards.
Dashboards provide a consistent way to track actual activity and results with benchmarks and thresholds to measure against. With dashboards and scoreboards, each employee and department can view the metrics that are important to them and manage individual targets (e.g., sales by region, cost of sales, profit margin) so they can improve performance, speed, and effectiveness. Those targets can then be rolled up across functional areas, departments, and business lines to provide high-level views of the organization's performance. Because the metric or metrics can be complex dashboards typically include multiple information panes.
JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. JavaScript is used to write functions that are embedded in HTML pages or frames. Frames are portions of pages. JavaScript is a suitable scripting language for creating dashboards. A dashboard can be displayed within a browser window. Each dashboard is typically composed of multiple frames that may be hierarchically arranged with a top frame including one or more children each of these including zero or more children frames. Each information pane can correspond to a frame in the browser window.
Script logs are valuable to a dashboard designer and others. The log for a frame is maintained when the frame is open. These logs are tied to the frame, which means that if the frame is redirected to another Universal Resource Identifier (URI) the log is lost. In addition if the frame is closed the log is lost.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide techniques to address the shortcomings of existing tools to design Performance Management tools. In particular, it would be desirable to provide a technique to capture and record the logs from all frames within a dashboard tool.